What solitary icebergs we are…
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out In August 1924, one year after returning from New York on board the Majestic — his single experience of travelling on a White Star liner — Conrad, the most remarkable of Ismay’s secret sharers, died of a heart attack. ‘Suddenly,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to take up his lodging in this country.’
Conrad produced more words on the Titanic than any of his literary contemporaries. Even the press expressed surprise at the silence of the writing community in response to the greatest peacetime shipwreck in history. ‘Few of the magazines this month have anything to say regarding the terrible disaster in the North Atlantic which has shocked and saddened the whole world,’ noted the Daily Telegraph in the summer of 1912 in its round-up of journals such as Blackwood’s, Cornhill and Strand. It is only ‘Mr Joseph Conrad in the English Review’, who ‘makes some comments on the catastrophe’. W. B. Yeats, the national poet of the country in which the Titanic was built, said nothing in public about the event at all; Henry James, who had made the same crossing between England and his native New York on a dozen occasions, mentions the Titanic only once, in a condolence letter to friends of the American artist Francis Millet, who was travelling with White House aide Archie Butt. E. M. Forster, despite his sense in Howards End that ‘any fate was titanic’, remained silent, as did D. H. Lawrence. John Galsworthy attended the inquiry in Washington but apart from comments confided to his diary, he wrote nothing about the experience, not even reporting his impressions to Conrad.
G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle produced newspaper copy when they were asked to do so, but there is no mention of the subject in their private correspondence, and nor did it bleed into their subsequent work. Virginia Woolf, who attended the British Board of Trade inquiry in London, said in a letter to her friend Katherine Cox that ‘what I should really like to do now, but must refrain, is a full account of the wreck of the Titanic. Do you know it’s a fact that ships don’t sink at that depth, but remain poised half-way down, and become perfectly flat, so that Mrs Stead is now like a pancake, and her eyes like copper coins.’ This image is Woolf’s only observation on the wreck: instead of writing a full account of the Titanic she wrote The Voyage Out, about another journey from which there was no return.
It was the general public who discovered a bottomless capacity for reading and writing about the Titanic. Those who had never before penned a line were inspired to produce poems by the yard, some of which were collected in special anthologies; newspapers were inexhaustible in their coverage of the story (the New York Times allotted seventy-five pages to the Titanic in the first week alone); survivors’ accounts were rushed out by the press, and popular journalists put together instant ‘biographies’ of the ship. The Titanic brought out the writer in everyone except those who wrote for a living, most of whom, like Ismay, were apparently struck dumb by the event. The novelists, poets and playwrights of the Edwardian age simply couldn’t find the words and what they did write served as a cover for talking about something else, like commerce, chance or class. ‘World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg’, runs a spoof headline in The Onions book, Our Dumb Century (1999). Even Hardy’s memorial poem, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’, written for the souvenir programme of the Covent Garden benefit matinee for the families of the dead on 4 May, can be read as a poem not about the Titanic but about his doomed marriage to Emma Gifford.1 ‘Trust a boat on the high seas,’ as Conrad puts it in Lord Jim, ‘to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion.’ Conrad’s insight could serve as the epigraph for the story of J. Bruce Ismay.
